The Witch-Hunters

No one outside of a few obsessed cranks would’ve noticed it if the Washington
Post hadn’t given it front page prominence last week: a formerly obscure
web site, propornot.com, which purports to identify a “Russian active measures”
campaign with some very specific goals in mind As Post “reporter” Craig
Timberg put
it:

“The flood of ‘fake news’ this election season got support from a sophisticated
Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online
with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald
Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers
who tracked the operation.”

While the Post piece doesn’t link directly to the propornot site – because
doing so would’ve exposed its laughably amateurish
“methodology” for all to see – Timberg does mention their list of online
Boris Badenovs, including
not only Antiwar.com but also the Drudge Report, WikiLeaks, David Stockman’s
Contra Corner, the Ron Paul Institute, LewRockwell.com, Counterpunch, Zero Hedge,
Naked Capitalism, Truthdig, Truth-out, and a host of others. These sites, according
to the Post, not only promoted a barrage of “fake news” with the aim
of defeating Mrs. Clinton, but they did so at the behest of a “centrally-directed”
(per propornot) intelligence operation undertaken by the Russians. So what did
this “fake news” consist of? Timberg “reports”:

“Russia’s increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery
– including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human ‘trolls,’ and networks
of websites and social-media accounts – echoed and amplified right-wing sites
across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially
fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy
cabal of global financiers. The effort also sought to heighten the appearance
of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed
Russia.”

Never mind that it was Hillary Clinton herself who heightened international
tensions by threatening military retaliation against the Russians for supposedly
unleashing via WikiLeaks a flood of embarrassing emails. In
a speech touted as outlining her foreign policy platform, she railed:

“You’ve seen reports. Russia’s hacked into a lot of things. China’s hacked
into a lot of things. Russia even hacked into the Democratic National Committee,
maybe even some state election systems. So, we’ve got to step up our game. Make
sure we are well defended and able to take the fight to those who go after us.

“As President, I will make it clear, that the United States will treat cyber
attacks just like any other attack. We will be ready with serious political,
economic and military responses.”

According to the “experts” at propornot – granted
anonymity by Timberg due to alleged fear of “Russian hackers” – to so much as
note this clear threat is to brand oneself as a “Russian agent of influence.”

And what about Mrs. Clinton’s health problems – was reporting on this driven
by Russian spies embedded in the alternative media? Or was it occasioned by
this
video, which saw her falling to the ground after leaving the 9/11 ceremony
early? Are the folks at propornot and their fans at the Washington Post
saying the amateur videographer who took that footage is a Russian secret agent?
Were the television networks and other
outlets that showed the footage “useful idiots,” to employ a favorite cold
war smear revived by propornot? Given their criteria for labeling people agents
of the Kremlin, the answer to these questions has to be yes – and now
we are falling down the rabbit hole, in a free-fall descent into lunacy.

Propornot’s “criteria” for inclusion
on their blacklist is actually an ideological litmus test: if you hold certain
views, you’re in the pay of the Kremlin, or else an “unwitting
agent” – as former CIA head Mike Morell said of Trump. If you say anything
at all positive about Russia or Putin – or a long list of entities, like China
or “radical political parties in the US or Europe” (does this include the GOP?)
– it’s a dead giveaway. We’re told to “investigate this by searching for mentions
of, for example, ‘russia’, on their site by Googling for ‘site:whateversite.com
Russia’, and seeing what comes up.”

If only Sherlock Holmes had had Google at his disposal, those
detective stories would’ve been a lot shorter!

The propornot site is filled with complex graphs, and the text is riddled with
“scientific”-sounding phrases, but when you get right down to it their “methodology”
boils down to this: if you don’t fit within a very narrow range of allowable
opinion, either falling off the left edge or the right edge, you’re either a
paid Russian troll or else you’re being “manipulated” by forces you don’t understand
and don’t want to understand.

Did you cheer on Brexit? You’re Putin’s pawn!

Are you worried about “World War III, nuclear devastation, etc.” instead of
being content in the knowledge that their preferred policy – unmitigated hostility
toward Russia — would “just result in a Cold War 2 and Russia’s eventual
peaceful defeat, like the last time”? Well, then, clearly you’re either on Putin’s
payroll, or else you’d like to be.

Other proscribed opinions include: “gold standard nuttery and attacks on the
US dollar,” believing “the mainstream media can’t be trusted,” and “anti-‘globalism.’”
And to underscore their complete lack of self-awareness, we’re told that additional
warning signs of Putinism are “hyperbolic alarmism” and “generally ridiculous
over-the-top assertions.”

In their world, it isn’t hyperbolic alarmism to point to ramshackle Russia,
with a GDP equal to Spain’s and a declining military budget that pales before
our own, as an existential threat to the West. And if you’re a reporter for
the Washington Post, which has destroyed what reputation it had by effectively
becoming the house organ of the Democratic National Committee, generally ridiculous
overt-the-top assertions, such as those proffered by propornot, are “news.”

The Post piece also cites an
article published on the “War On The Rocks” web site (which is exactly what
it sounds like). The authors, a triumvirate of neocons, avers that they’ve been
“tracking” “Russian propaganda” efforts since 2014, and they’ve concluded that
the Grand Goal of the Russkies is to “Erode trust between citizens and elected
officials and democratic institutions” – as if this process isn’t occurring
naturally due to the depredations of a corrupt and arrogant political class.

Another insidious theme of Russian “active measures” as identified by these
geniuses is “Stoking fears over the national
debt, attacking institutions such as the Federal Reserve, and attempts to discredit Western financial experts
and business leaders.” So we mustn’t talk about the national debt – because
to do so brands one as a cog in Putin’s propaganda machine. Gee, based on these
criteria, we can only conclude that every vaguely conservative politician running
for office in the last decade or so is part of the Vast Russian Conspiracy,
not to mention numerous economists.

Yes, these people are serious – but why should
anyone take them seriously? Why is the Washington Post “reporting” this
nonsense – and putting it on the front page, no less? In short, what’s the purpose of this virulent
propaganda campaign? After all, Hillary Clinton has been defeated, along with
her campaign theme of “A vote for Trump is a vote for Putin.” What does a continuation
of this losing mantra hope to accomplish?

The folks at propornot are explicit about their goal: they want the government
to step in. They want to close down these “agents of influence.” In their own
words, they want the FBI and the Department of Justice to launch “formal investigations”
of the sites on their blacklist on the grounds that “the kind of folks who make
propaganda for brutal oligarchies are often involved in a wide range of bad
business.” They accuse the proprietors of the listed web sites – including us,
by the way – of having “violated the Espionage Act, the Foreign Agents Registration
Act, and other related laws.”

Oh, but they say they want to “avoid McCarthyism”! They just want to shut us
down and shut us up.

These people are authoritarians, plain and simple: under the guise of fighting
authoritarianism, they seek to ban dissenting views, jail the dissenters, and
impose a narrow range of permissible debate on the public discourse. They are
dangerous, and they need to be outed and publicly shamed.

To be included on their list of “subversives” is really a badge of honor, and
one we here at Antiwar.com wear proudly.

A
Special Note: When the War Party takes out after you, you know you’re
doing something right. And we’ve been doing it since 1995, in spite of the smears,
and the howls of outrage coming from all the Usual Suspects. But we can’t continue
to do it – not even for a minute – without your
support.

You’ll notice, if you go to our front page, that we’re in the midst of our
Winter fundraising drive, and I have to say if I were the folks at propornot,
I’d be quite happy to look at the graph at the top of the page that measures
our progress – because those numbers are low. They must be jumping for joy!

Just think how unhappy they’d be if that bar graph advanced significantly in
the next 48 hours! And you do want to make the lives of our warmongers
miserable, don’t you?

We don’t get the funding we need to keep going from big foundations, eccentric
billionaires, or the corporate media – we depend on you, our readers, to support
the kind of independent journalism that the War Party wants to eliminate. Your
tax-deductible donation is needed now
to fight back against these would-be censors – before they succeed in accomplishing
their goal.

Author: Justin Raimondo

Justin Raimondo is editor-at-large at Antiwar.com, and a senior fellow at the Randolph Bourne Institute. He is a contributing editor at The American Conservative, and writes a monthly column for Chronicles. He is the author of Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement [Center for Libertarian Studies, 1993; Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2000], and An Enemy of the State: The Life of Murray N. Rothbard [Prometheus Books, 2000].
View all posts by Justin Raimondo